Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start
the habit of thoughtful wishes. (Mary Martin)

LENR itself- at birth was considered kind of analogy of hot
fusion, paradoxically taking place in impossible mild conditions. The history
of the field has generated other analogies too.

It is true however not directly useful or inspiring or
relevant that “cold fusion is for hot fusion what biochemistry is to chemistry”
as Chris Tinsley has wisely stated- not always a reason to happiness.

LENR was compared with very successful technologies
having

difficult start-up periods as aviation or transistors, a
noble, over-optimistic and inspiring idea that also has not helped much,
realistically speaking. Success was not contagious.

Pragmatically and philosophically LENR is very similar
with High Temperature Super-Conductivity; however HTSC is successful and
prosperous, while LENR is- the contrary.

Who dares to state that LENR is understood, is under
control and the best way to convert it in an important energy source is already
known? Painfully rhetorical question having only fragments of answers...

One morning, last week, during processing my e-mails, I
found this paper:

and I suddenly realized- “but this is about LENR!” The
authors speak about management, more specifically management in trouble;
however the obstacles, barriers and problems are those

of LENR, this is a new, inspiring analogy for LENR.
Surely you remember that I have stated many times that technology, management
and leadership are the best sources for the modern philosophy, realistic and
pragmatic.

See the introductory, PROBLEM, part of the paper:

Managing baffles us with its complexity. Leaders
looking to improve managing do not know where to start, much less where to
finish. So even though the gales of creative destruction continually threaten
their enterprises, they do not necessarily see radically revising their
managing as the obvious solution. But that’s exactly what their enterprises
need.

Let’s translate this in LENR-ese, not very rigorously,
following the original text, but emphasizing our situation and mentality:

“LENR baffles us with its complexity, ambiguity,
uncertainty

and volatility. It is slippery like an eel. Scientists,
after- soon 26- years of intensive and creative efforts, still do not know the
basics of this seemingly unmanageable process and are far from knowing how it
can be tamed and put to useful work. So even if the threat of extinction or of
degeneration in a lab curiosity is serious, but not immediate, the theories and
approaches considered are not changing in a really radical manner, old myths
and anecdotes and gurus remain dominant and authoritative. Changes coming from
outside the community are accepted with difficulty.”

The leadership paper continues with:

“In his recentHBRarticle, Gary Hamel described
traditional-enterprise ailments as being inertial, incremental, and insipid. He
goes on to point out, “Until we challenge our foundational beliefs, we won’t be
able to build organizations that are substantially more capable than the ones
we have today.” How true! But it’s hard to challenge current beliefs when
managing itself remains a bit of a mystery.”

I am amazed by adequate words as this “inertial,
incremental, and insipid” – in the case of LENR being so valid for,
respectively, approach-, progress- and group mentality.

Or for the “foundational beliefs” – never seriously
questioned.

The HBR paper continues to describe the weaknesses of the
management and of the enterprises when “managing itselfremains a bit
of a mystery.” LENR is even more a
mystery.

The HBR opus also asks for “vitalization rather thanoptimization”; for LENR this is even more radical –it needs
“resurrection not systematic improvement, that does not work”.

Creative destruction – in the case of LENR is a
pre-condition of change and survival. Management needs a good framework to make
sense of it; LENR is in a very similar situation. The existing explanations –
ambitiously called theories do not make sense of it.

Read please the details specific for management in the
paper

The Problem part is easier to understand and the
management-in-trouble/ LENR similarity is sound and sure. The Solution part
needs more effort – it is more about inspiration than of direct learning and
application.

THE SOLUTION FOR MANAGEMENT

The solution for management is based on (1) economic value creation – (2)
accepting the challenge that an enterprise ought to be able to thrive forever,
if it chooses to. The true Solution for LENR is 1) intense and reliable
energy creation 2) conquering a great segment of the world’s energy market, replacing
fossils and dwarfing the price of energy.

For achieving the desired solution for management the
following laws must be applied – all of them, laws of: Potential, Meaning,
Creativity, Learning, Humanity, Vitality, Coherence

Short description of the laws- from the HBR paper:

The Law of Potential:Only the enterprise that unleashes
potential, through meeting its workers’ innate needs, induces human engagement
to its fullest.

The Law of Meaning:Only the enterprise that infuses meaning,
through a shared purpose, effects alignment among fully engaged workers.

The Law of Creativity:Only the enterprise that liberates
creativity, through applying intuition and exercising free will, regularly
discovers opportunities for surprising wealth-producing innovations.

The Law of Learning:Only the enterprise that invigorates
learning – through exploring, exploiting, and orchestrating – generates the
knowledge necessary to persistently create new value among infinite
possibilities.

The Law of Humanity:Only the enterprise that enriches humanity,
through the knowledge embedded in its business activities, creates offerings of
unquestionable economic value.

The Law of Vitality:Only the enterprise that attains vitality,
through its incessant destructive recreation, produces the wealth necessary to
survive.

The Law of Coherence:Only the enterprise that sustains coherence
in all its aspects, through ongoing orchestration, regenerates itself to thrive
indefinitely.

This is a complete set of laws.

THE SOLUTION FOR LENR

In my opinion/thinking/LENR philosophy, our field needs
other laws, namely of: Otherness, Diversity.
Complexity, Metamorphosis, Creativity, Dynamicity- with some unavoidable superposition
and repetitions in the definitions and descriptions.

The Law of Otherness.

Only by understanding that LENR is an unprecedented case
of a brand new (newly discovered, in urgent need to be recognized) science that
adds to the established science and does not contradicts it- can be elaborated
an efficient development strategy for it.

It is necessary to build a realistic vision of the field,
how it was born in the most unfortunate conditions and has grown rather old
(but not grown up) in a very hostile environment. It is oppressed but also
self-limited science that has to be re-written from the basics.

LENR is a new branch of science and technology that has
been completely misunderstood from its very start. It was discussed if it does
respect or not the existing laws of physics when actually it goes much beyond
this to a lot of new laws of not only physics but also materials science and
technology. The most adequate metaphor of LENR was created in its 18th
year of existence: Black Swan (N.N. Taleb’s book published in 2007) - something
surprisingly, unpredictably and uniquely new, very different from anything
known before. See please the guest editorial by Alain Coetmeur: http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2013/09/nassim-nicholas-taleb-and-cold-fusion_5.html

Bad luck- the Black Swan was seen just as a new type of
Nuclear Goose and this is not true.

LENR can appear in many places, in diverse forms but it
has been found in the worst circumstances possible most inadequate for
technological progress- without radical changes.

It exists a very simple but inexorable rule:

wet or not fully degassed metallic surfaces cannot work
reliably in LENR and therefore the cradle of it, the electrolytic PdD cell
cannot solve the vital problems of reproducibility and scale up. The F&P
Cell’s great historical merit is that it has demonstrated the very existence of
LENR (excess heat) but it cannot be used for developing any kind of practical
applications. [For the time given this is not more than my personal opinion, shared
by few friends however Ego Out is my own porta-voce]

The skeptics and dogmatics have attacked LENR for
violating of the sacrosanct Laws of Physics and because it pretends to be a
nuclear phenomenon while the “believers” have defended it trying to show that
the standard Laws of Physics are respected; this war had very destructive
consequences for the field- bad reputation, reduced funding, ostracization from
the high impact journals. Within the initially developed paradigm, LENR’s
situation is hopeless despite the immense still unexplored potential.

Essence of the Law of Otherness:

LENR IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS TO BE.

The Law of Complexity.

Only by accepting the exceptional, broad and deep
complexity of LENR, progress in the field becomes a reality.

LENR is a matter too complex to be let to the physicists
alone. It needs very broad multi- and trans-disciplinarity. It belongs to
chemistry, physics, materials science, nanotechnology, engineering, all largo
sensu and in very intricate ways No single theory can explain LENR that is a
multi-stage, multi-step, non-linear combination of phenomena – it needs a bunch
of diverse theories to be understood. The single-theory, search for a
simplistic LENR solution was/is doing a lot of harm; simplicity is a sure
recipe for disaster in the VUCA World of LENR: http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2014/07/the-vuca-world-of-lenr-how-long-it-will.html Simplicity is the most toxic label that can
be applied to LENR.

One of the sources of complexity of LENR is that it is
not only, not entirely, not ‘as usual’- nuclear. The skeptics are right in the
sense that it is not fusion. The phenomena are: pre-nuclear, nuclear-and
post-nuclear; soon many institutes will develop long range research plans for
all these subdivisions of LENR.

Essence of the Law of complexity:

LENR IS MUCH MORE THAN IT SEEMS
TO BE.

The Law of Diversity.

Only by systematic discovery and exploration of the
numerous variants and forms of LENR via experimental work will we able to construct
the most useful forms of LENR and (after solving the existential problems) will
we get access to a richness of new scientific data and ideas.

LENR is actually HMDI – Hydrogen –Metal Deep Interaction

and, as Francesco Piantelli has stated it in practice,
the process does work not only with nickel, but with all transition metals.

Specific results will be obtained for example with W
having very high melting temperature, with Fe- the cheapest, Ti- very light
one, Cr- the “faiblesse” of our friend Stoyan Sargoytchev.

The least “nuclear” metals- no dangerous radiation will
prevail

for domestic applications. Think about metal mixtures and
alloys- how many possibilities! Take in consideration the metal-support
interaction well known from catalysis.

The Defkalion Principle: “make hydrogen more reactive and
the metal more receptive” will be applied in various forms.

We already know that LENR has a broad range of working
temperatures- a new factor of diversity, and of exclusion of the

I am very curious
to see it so I will take care to connect my grave to the Internet.

The essence of the Law of Diversity:

LENR APPEARS IN A PLURALITY OF
FORMS

The Law of Metamorphosis.

Only by profound transformative changes, the initially
discovered form of LENR can be converted in an useful source of energy.

The field does not grow by maturation, slow systematic
improvements but by very sudden, radical changes (for management it is about
creative destruction- here it is better to use “metamorphosis”0. Thus the weak
and unreliable LENR process is converted in a powerful massive excess heat
release>

It is a 2-4 orders of magnitude difference between the
faint LENR and the intense form I named LENR+.

Everything we have learned about Pd D cold fusion LENR is
not applicable to LENR+ that is a different species. It is the great merit of
Andrea Rossi to have discovered and demonstrated the possibility of LENR+- a
decisive step to a commercial energy generator. If LENR classic is the
Fleischmann-Pons Effect, LENR+ is the Andrea Rossi Effect.

Hundred years from now it will be forgotten that Rossi
was rather hesitant and slow in achieving control over that massive heat
release an overly difficult task of engineering, in case you do not use the best
method to trigger and stimulate LENR+.

(I am well aware that the dichotomy LENR/LENR+ again
belongs, for the time given- to my personal opinion; in the LENR community the
LENR+ deniers still dominate)

The essence of Law
of Metamorphosis:

LENR BECOMES USEFUL ONLY VIA A
GREAT QYUALITATIVE LEAP TO LENR+.

The Law of Creativity.

Only by invention, advanced engineering and innovation
can be metamorphosed the initial LENR in the energy source based on LENR+.

LENR was discovered, LENR+ has to be invented, in
multiple forms.

The initially discovered form of LENR is not adequate neither
for scientific study in depth nor for technological development; a new one had
to be created and this is LENR+.

LENR is studied with the scientific method, LENR+ is
solved by combining science and technology- engineering is the key.

The theories of LENR+ are not only descriptive,
explicative, prohibitive or even predictive- they are also productive telling
what and how must we do to put LENR+ to work for us as a useful source of
energy.

The essence of the Law of Creativity.

THE USEFUL FORMS OF LENR+ ARE
PRODUCTS OF HUMAN CREATIVITY.

The Law of Dynamicity.

Only by creating intensively dynamic systems can we build
LENR+ energy sources.

LENR is based on static preformed active sites at low
(<100C) temperatures, LENR+ happens in dynamic continuously formed active
sites at high (>200 C) temperatures.

LENR+ is an application of Nanoplasmonics- a very dynamic
new science in multiple senses. It is about dynamics on the metal surfaces and
about the dynamics of these surfaces, themselves...

a) Probably the fine paper re Management will be more
successful, popular and applied in practice then my adaptation of it for LENR-
smelling of speculation and dissent. LENR has only minor and transient
problems, LENR+ is just a myth. Time to sharpen the tools in my box as NY would
say. Advancing boldly from “errare humanum est” to “perseverare diabolicum.”

b) LENR is only a provisional name; the useful form of
the deep interaction of hydrogen with transition metals is a group of phenomena
very different from what we think now about PdD generated LENR.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

The visit of Bill Gates at ENEA’s Frascati Lab (Nov 12)
and his discussion with the Italia leading cold fusionist Prof. Vittorio
Violante- excellent news! Violante is the absolute champion of palladium
metallurgy and study of Pd’s most intimate metallurgy – an admirable researcher
and a fighter for the cold fusion truth.

A few days after this historical meeting we still don’t
know the essence- the funds donated by Bill Gates directly and specifically to
cold fusion/LENR research- what fraction of the 1 billion $/year (?) allocated
for hot fusion and this is very important because except game changing new
ideas money is the most important for creating the future of LENR.

I am hesitating to comment at this blog about the
implications of this visit- trying to avoid the question if LENR or LENR+

deserves the funding. Not so much the question- as my
answer, easily predictable, to it.

Due to these difficulties I cannot contribute with
original ideas to this discussion, however thanks to the generous offer of my
friend Russ George I will republish his fine paper here.

Russ is a great CF/LENR experimenter, I know him from my
Fusion Facts era and it was a pleasure to exchange ideas with him and to learn
about his achievements which go much beyond cold fusion. The paper was
published on his great blog; I warmly recommend you to explore this Blog.

Russ is well informed: “I have long known Lowell
Wood who took Gates to Frascati. He, Edward Teller, and I were close to
becoming partners in cold fusion back in the middle nineties but Lowell’s and
Teller’s affiliation with the dark secret world made my attorney advisor super
nervous… I took the attorney’s advice which I now deeply regret and did not
accept Teller’s offer to make it all happen. The proposition at the time was to
form a foundation to pursue the gas phase nano-particle cold fusion results
that are so similar to what is being seen today.”

Russ is deeply dedicated to our cause: “We are both
getting too old to allow the anti-social media trolls to win on this vital
technology that will save the world for our grandchildren.”

Is There A Black Swan Taking Flight

Early explorer John C. Fremont witnessed birds taking flight at dawn on marshes of the Great Salt Lake and wrote in 1843, “The waterfowl made a noise like distant thunder . . . as the whole scene animated with waterfowl.”

For many years in my younger days I spent much time as a ‘bird watcher,’ my favorites were waterfowl. I loved to rise before dawn so that I could wade out to the middle of large marshlands where I could witness the dawn breaking flights of the birds. In those marshes along the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah there were times when the sky would go from empty to being filled with more than a million birds within minutes. The cacophony of bird sound both in the flapping of wings and joyous squawking was a whole body and spiritual experience.

A skilled listener could, through it all, pick out the different species, the swans were especially distinctive and rare. Rarest of all of course was the black swan. They are legendary harbingers of dramatic change as told in this book review by Bill Gates.

The world of cold fusion has long been a squawking cacophony with very few swans. Wild swans are shy creatures who after the first onslaughts of vociferous attacks like those cold fusion is subjected to, to this day, typically remain very quiet. For decades the squawking of the scavengers and coots amongst men have been the overwhelming chorus. The malevolent squawkers have been so rowdy that they have scared the experimentalists and first hand observers from public view. But just maybe things have changed.

Once in a while I hear of something new in the cold fusion cacophony. A chance sighting or perhaps a distinctive call of a swan. This just happened in the form of an obscure photo of a very few people, less than a dozen, sitting in a room I have had the pleasure of sitting in.

There in Frascati Italy among the clutter of a small ENEA laboratory sits the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, front row center listening to a dear colleague Vittorio Violante who is flying him through what Vittorio knows best…Cold Fusion. I can say with confidence Professor Violante is doing a great job telling the story of cold fusion, he has been steadfast and with us in this work for nearly as long as I, surely more than 20 years.

Vittorio Violante showing Bill Gates Cold Fusion with bearded Lowell Wood looking on. (Wood is prominent in the US Nuclear World and is sometimes referred to as the apprentice of Dr. Strangelove)

Why is it Bill Gates has just this month chosen to make a visit to Frascati? The labs at Frascati are Italy’s national labs and the equal to the famed Los Alamos here in the USA. Cold fusion has been studied there for nearly 25 years. That and the fact that Italy has long been known for its pioneers in science, think DaVinci and Galileo.

The Fascati labs, just like national labs in the USA, are very proper ‘shirt and tie’ environments and difficult to be productive in, especially for such out of the box heretical energy physics as cold fusion. They are stalwart and respectable beyond reproach. It’s no wonder Mr. Gates would make a pilgrimage to the world’s Vatican of cold fusion. A collection of photos from Mr. Gates visit is available on the Frascati Facebook page here.

Cold fusion, or as some averse to the original name for this phenomenal research and discovery have renamed LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) is finally breaking into flight. The breakthrough has been creating the reactive environment in-situ most effectively made possible by many means via the condensation of nano-particles of hydrogen loving metals in the presence of hydrogen isotopes. There are a number of means to attain this nano-scopic cold fusion reactive environment.

What Mr. Gates Might Have Learned On How To Produce Cold Fusion

One can start with the appropriate sized nano particles of metal and simply tip a scoop of the material into a tiny vessel which contains hydrogen isotopes. Or one can place a parent material into a vessel with the same hydrogen isotopes (primarily deuterium – heavy hydrogen) and heat the materials in some fashion so that the metal sublimates and re-deposits forming nano-particles via this in-situ deposition. Keep in mind these experiments involve just a few dollars worth of materials to produce a working cold fusion reactor. And they are inherently modular, meaning to see more effect or make more heat simply build many small cold fusion reactors and run them together.

Once sufficient nano-material has reformed the heat in the system is sufficient to produce the cold nuclear effect, cold meaning some hundreds not millions of degrees. When done by the best experimentalists in the field large amounts of heat, helium, and other nuclear products are seen in irrefutable amounts.

Rossi IH E-Cat Patent

Some like Andrea Rossi and his US corporate sponsors/license holders,Industrial Heat, seem to be able to produce megawatts of heat with output heat many times the input heat required to initiate and sustain the reactions for months at a time. They have just applied for a patent on the technology. Rossi’s work also enjoys the support of ELFORSK a major European energy research organization that has been testing his technology.
.

Footprints on the trail of cold fusion

Today the most popular means to produce cold fusion is virtually identical to experiments I performed more than a decade ago. There I used palladium that was first pre-loaded with deuterium by exposure to high pressure in a small glow discharge tube. In fact I used a simple ‘neon tube’ the same as are used by neon sign makers. How this came to happen, beginning in the spring and summer of 1995, was with the help of my friend Jeff Golin who was a plasma physicist by vocation and a neon light artist by avocation. In his neon artists studio, a few blocks away from my Palo Alto area ‘garage lab’ and with the help of his deft and practiced touch in the glass working and vacuum tube lab techniques we made my experimental ideas shine.

In 10 cm long 1 cm diameter glass tubes a short, 2 cm, piece of palladium foil or sometimes the nano-particle palladium powder of Arata was subjected to a glow discharge environment (sub-atmospheric pressure). The palladium would sputter and build up nano particles in the tube. Then the anomalous but hoped for results would appear. After a few hours one end of short metal foil would begin to regularly cycle from being cool silver in color to bright cherry red orange, at a temperature of at least 600-800 C estimated by its color temperature.

The Arata nano-powder version of this did not glow with apparent heat but did yield dramatic radiation. Read more about how this led to an interesting offer to work with the master of fusion in my narrative ofworking with Edward Teller on this.

The experiment would hold in its hot condition for a few minutes then abruptly drop back to its normal cool silver color. After “resting” for a short time, tens of minutes, the metal strip would once again promptly rise to its bright cherry red orange hot condition. Over the course of many hours the experiment repeatedly heated and cooled until finally as it heated one last time the temperature became too much for the simple glass tube which cracked and broke allowing air to leak into and quench the low pressure glow discharge environment within.

My Cold Fusion Simple Kilowatt™ Teller bulb heater now in development

Alas had I made that first experiment iteration with thicker quartz glass it would likely be running hot to this day.

Clearly there are improvements in this simple demonstrable cold fusion work in hand today. Many hydrogen loving metals and mixtures have been vetted and some are vastly superior to others. While my work was mostly with heavy hydrogen, deuterium, many now work with ordinary hydrogen that has only a trace of deuterium 1 part in 6000 in it. Some are supporting theories that have the simple proton bearing hydrogen being a primary reactant as opposed to the more traditional fusionable deuterium.

Surely in the deuterium systems prodigious heat along with commensurate 4He helium, which is the expected fusion product of D+D is observed. But over the years many high Z isoptope anomalies have suggested some nuclear process that inserts tiny nuclei into larger nuclei exists.

What if the richest man in the world just came to believe in cold fusion?

With even the tiniest fraction of his wealth Bill Gates can become the Black Swan that heralds a new age of energy saving the world from the ravages of the fossil fuel age just in the nick of time. Here’s some inspiration Mr. Gates…. hope

An Italian tide lifts all boats.

I for one am hopeful the times they are a changing and cold fusion and ocean pastures will be the swan song of the fossil fuel age and flowers of plankton to be placed into the gun barrels of the fossils of this age that I have worked to help deliver to the world for 25 years.